Laurie: The Lost Companion
by bots4bridge
Summary: The Doctor has just been on the Voyage of the Damned This is between Martha and Donna . He has arrived in Cambridge, searching for an alien that threatens the university. Laurie is a bored genius attending Cambridge with no family. Lately, she has been having strange dreams. A strange man in a blue box just appeared in one of them. Little does she know that he will change her life


I was falling. The blackness reached up with its many arms, dragging me down, swallowing me. There was no smell, no sound just the feeling of the hands pulling me down, down, down. Then, out of the darkness, a deep and dark voice groaned, "We are coming. The feast is soon. We are coming. We are HUNGRY!"

I woke up in a cold sweat. That was the twelfth time I had had that dream in a row. Night after night, the unearthly hands pulled me down, down, down. But this time, something had been different. A man had been standing above me. He had been in a box, about the size of a phone booth, similar to the one out on the street. But it had been blue and wooden. And, from what I could see, it had looked nothing like a phone booth on the inside. The man that stood there had been wearing a long, billowing coat. His face had been filled with anguished rage, as though he had just lost someone. And I had the strangest feeling that that someone was me.

I sat in class at university. The professor was droning on and on about quantum physics. I was soo bored. I had secretly attended and graduated from this very same university a year ago; I started at fourteen, I was now nineteen. But the matron at my old Home insisted that all her charges attend university; she attended every single graduation. So I had to suffer through four more years of review, Ben though I was bloody brilliant enough to ace the senior final exams.

I glanced out the window. For some reason, I thought I saw the billowing coat from my dream. I shook my head and it was gone. It was just a nightmare. It couldn't be real. It was just. A. Dream.

When I left class later that day, I kept feeling like I was being followed. I glanced behind me several times, but there was nothing. As I walked on, the ominous feeling shadowing me remained. I approached my street. I glanced behind me, expecting there to be nothing. I couldn't have been more wrong.

There was a...

A...

A...

Thing behind me. It was monstrous, about the size I would expect a dinosaur to be. I stood there, like a deer in the headlights. It approached me lumbering step by lumbering step. It's mouth opened in a roar, revealing countless menacing teeth. I imagined them ripping me to shreds. The image was gruesome enough for me to shake off my initial urge to stand rooted in place. Then I did the only thing that made any sense. I ran.

For some reason, I didn't realize I was close to home. I turned down an alleyway and up the next street. I just kept running, running, running. The thing always stayed about a block behind me. I could never shake it. I stopped for a breather as I rounded a corner. Then, I realized something. I couldn't run forever. I was going to die.

I started running again, giving it everything I had. Run. Run. Run. Run. Run. Run. SLAM. I fell to the ground, slightly dazed. What had I bumped in to? I shook my head to clear it and looked up. A man in a blue suit stood over me.

I shouted at him, "There's a thing, a monster chasing me. We have too..." I paused as he stared into a mirror contraption he was carrying. In it, I could see the image of the monster barreling toward us. "Krayfayis," he muttered. He looked back down at me. "Oh. Yes. We should run." He grabbed my hand and pulled me up. We ran down the street.

We ran for blocks in silence. Why was I running with this man? I didn't even know his name.

"Who are you?" I asked between breaths.

"Who are you?" he asked in reply.

"I'm Laurie."

"Nice name, Laurie. Pleasure to meet you. I'm the Doctor."

Just the Doctor? That was strange. We turned down an alley. "Are you a professor?" I queried.

"No," he replied.

"A medical doctor?"

"No."

"Then doctor of what? Doctor who?"

He smiled, "Nothing. Everything. I'm just the Doctor."

The alley dead-ended into a courtyard. I turned around. The creature was coming down the alley. We were cornered.

I picked up a piece of wood and started hitting the creature with it, trying anything to fight it. The man, this Doctor, pulled out a strange little torchy thingy. He turned it on and pointed it t the mirror contraption he was carrying. The creature lumbered closer. It was gaining ground. I kept hitting it with the wooden plank, but I failed to drive back the thing. The Doctor kept fiddling with the torch thing. Finally, an image popped up on the mirror contraption.

"Aah. Yes!" the Doctor exclaimed. He turned to me. "Radishes! Laurie, do you happen to have any radishes?"

"Radishes?" I yelled. I gave the creature another whack. "Why do you need radishes?"

"They'll sedate it. For fifty years." the Doctor explained.

I slowly backed away from the creature. I bent down and searched through my bag, which had fallen to the ground, hoping there was something in there from my lunch that would help. Aha! I picked up a tiny self serve packet. "Would horse radish work?" I asked, hoping for the best.

"Yes!" shouted the Doctor. I grabbed slowly walked towards the creature, opening the packet and setting it about five feet from the thing. It stepped forward as I backed away, picking up the packet and swallowing it. The Doctor and I stood still, not wanting to provoke the creature. The thing opened its mouth in a calm roar. Was it yawning? It then took a few wobbly, drunken steps before collapsing to the ground with a loud thwoomp.

I turned to the strange man, the Doctor. "Wh-what was that thing?"

"That, Laurie, was a krayfayis."

"What is that?" I asked. Seriously, was this guy insane?

"They travel in herds across the universe, stopping at planets along the way. This one was weak; it got left behind."

"Why was it chasing me?" I demanded. I stared at the thing.

"The question is, how can you see it?" the Doctor asked, almost talking to himself. He moved towards me and reached up with his hand, snatching off my glasses.

"Hey!" I shouted. "I need those to..." I was astonished. The thing. The krayfayis. It had disappeared. "Where did it go? Doctor, where did that thing go?"

He pointed the torch at my glasses. I heard a whirring sound as a blue light shone from the torch. He murmured something under his breath and turned to me, handing my glasses back.

"Thanks," I muttered, slightly annoyed.

"Somehow, the glass in your glasses got infused with optinvisioxide. The same stuff that's in that mirror over there," he gestured to the weird contraption he had been carrying. "Don't ask me how it got there. I can't trace it." I was sure of it now. The Doctor, if that was his actual name, was insane.

"What are you talking about?" I retorted. "It's all gibberish. Where does all this stuff come from? And that torch. What in the world does it do? I doesn't even give off good light. And who are you, really?"

"Oh. Alright." The Doctor smiled. "Let me show you something." And then he walked away. I followed, for what if there was some truth to all that gibberish. And, if there was some truth to it, I had just met the most brilliant man in the world.

He led me back the way we had come, through the labyrinth of alleyways and streets we had run down. How in the world did he remember them all? We went to the exact spot where I had bumped into him. My mouth fell open. There, on the sidewalk, was the blue box from my dream. How could it be real? It was just a dream. Wasn't it?

The Doctor took a key out of his pocket and inserted it into the door. It swung inwards. He stepped inside. After a moment, he stuck his head back out of the door, "Well, aren't you coming?" I walked towards the box and stepped inside.

I stood there for a moment, dumbfounded. Instead of being just a normal small wooden box on the inside, there was a circular room about ten meters in diameter. Tall strips of metal with large circles along them stretched to the apex of the dome. It looked like coral. In the center of the room was a sort of round desk covered with a jumble of buttons, knobs, switches, screens, and levers. In the center of the desk was a tall pillar which was lit up with a pale green light at the bottom. There was a brown leather seat by the desk. Along the walls, there were bunk beds and countless doors, all, I supposed, leading to other rooms.

"It's, it's bigger on the inside." I looked out the door. We were still on the street, still in a little blue box in England. "How? What is this place? Where are we?"

The Doctor smiled gleefully, "Yes. It's bigger on the inside. Oh! I love that part! It's my spaceship."

"B-but where are the boosters? Where are the seats? How...?"

The Doctor cut me off, "It also travels in time."

I was at a loss for words. No one on Earth had that technology. No one. And the whole thing with it being bigger on the inside...

"Are you an..." I asked. I assumed that if the answer was yes, the last word would be implied.

"Yes. I'm I'm a nine-hundred six year old Time Lord," he confirmed.

"Seriously? Are you the only one? Or are their others of your kind? Or even other races?"

"I am the last of my kind," he said, almost in a whisper, his voice containing a twinge of grief. "But there are billions of planets, thousands of millions of them inhabited. And we have billions of years of civilizations.

"Wait. We?" I was confused. I had classes to take. Things to do.

"There's your life," he nodded towards the door. He set his hand on the desk, which I supposed was probably the control console. "And here's the universe. Sometimes, the universe feels so big, so vast. And I feel lonely. Would you like to see the universe? Would you like to come with me?"

I smiled. I had made my decision. Maybe my dream meant something. Maybe I would die. But, no matter what, I wanted my life to be extraordinary. And this might be my only chance. I walked to the door and slammed it closed.

"So, Doctor, where are we going?"

He smiled and pressed a button. " Where do you want to start?"


End file.
